Transportation

Arm launches new chip designs for autonomous systems

Comment

GettyImages 1146397412
Image Credits: SAM YEH / Contributor / Getty Images

Chip designer Arm today announced the launch of a new set of solutions for autonomous systems for both automotive and industrial use cases. These include the Arm Cortex-A78AE high-performance CPU,
the Mali-G78AE GPU and Arm Mali-C71AE image signal processor.

What makes all three of these chips stand out is that they have built-in safety features. “Safety,” in this context, means that the chips feature additional capabilities that ensure that every calculation is essentially double-checked.

Traditionally, Arm has offered two modes for its CPU. In “split mode,” all cores work independently and only go offline every now and then for quick sanity checks. This works well for applications with low or no safety requirements as the cores can run at close to their maximum performance.

Image Credits: Arm

In “locked mode,” cores run in pairs and their operations are cross-checked against each other. This helps these chips satisfy various automotive safety requirements, but comes with an obvious performance penalty, as you can only use half the cores.

Today, the company introduced its new hybrid mode for its CPUs, which combines the best of both worlds for high-performance use cases where only medium failure detection is needed. It allows the cores to still run in split mode, but the shared cluster logic, which integrates the cores, now runs in lock mode. That provides the safety mechanisms of lock mode — just at a different layer — with the performance of split mode.

Arm focuses on AI with its new Cortex-M CPU and Ethos-U NPU

For the new AE-version of the Mali GPU, Arm is introducing what it calls “flexible partitioning,” which makes it easier to split the various GPU cores between workloads as needed. That means features like maps can run in one partition, separate from safety features like driver monitoring or running the instrument cluster.

Traditionally, Arm targeted these A0E-branded designs at the automotive industry. “AE” actually used to stand for “automotive enhanced.” Now, however, it is targeting the broader market for autonomous systems.

“We introduced this AE [intellectual property]. It was referring to ‘automotive enhanced,’ originally, and so it has specific features, performance, safety, for the automotive market,” Arm’s VP of its automotive business, Chet Babla, told me. “But fast-forward to today and what we’ve realized that in talking to industrial OEMs and the compute requirements, the safety requirements they have, they’ve said, ‘actually, what you’re doing in the automotive space is very applicable to the compute and safety challenges that we face.’ ”

While Arm is remaining relatively quiet about its $40 billion acquisition by Nvidia, which is still going the regulatory process, it’s worth noting that both companies have set their eyes on this market for autonomous systems, with Nvidia offering its own platform for autonomous robots, using its Jetson AGX, for example, which use ARM CPUs in addition to Nvidia’s own GPUs. It looks like that won’t change anytime soon.

“Powerful new processing capabilities are needed to enable future autonomous vehicles and machines. As a lead partner for the new Arm Cortex-A78AE, NVIDIA delivers the advanced performance and safety
these edge AI systems require with our next-generation NVIDIA Orin SoC,” said Gary Hicok, senior vice president of hardware development at NVIDIA.

Nvidia confirms $40B purchase of Arm, bringing together two chip giants

More TechCrunch

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review. This week had two major events from OpenAI and Google. OpenAI’s spring update event saw the reveal of its new model, GPT-4o, which…

OpenAI and Google lay out their competing AI visions

Expedia says Rathi Murthy and Sreenivas Rachamadugu, respectively its CTO and senior vice president of core services product & engineering, are no longer employed at the travel booking company. In…

Expedia says two execs dismissed after ‘violation of company policy’

When Jeffrey Wang posted to X asking if anyone wanted to go in on an order of fancy-but-affordable office nap pods, he didn’t expect the post to go viral.

With AI startups booming, nap pods and Silicon Valley hustle culture are back

OpenAI’s Superalignment team, responsible for developing ways to govern and steer “superintelligent” AI systems, was promised 20% of the company’s compute resources, according to a person from that team. But…

OpenAI created a team to control ‘superintelligent’ AI — then let it wither, source says

A new crop of early-stage startups — along with some recent VC investments — illustrates a niche emerging in the autonomous vehicle technology sector. Unlike the companies bringing robotaxis to…

VCs and the military are fueling self-driving startups that don’t need roads

When the founders of Sagetap, Sahil Khanna and Kevin Hughes, started working at early-stage enterprise software startups, they were surprised to find that the companies they worked at were trying…

Deal Dive: Sagetap looks to bring enterprise software sales into the 21st century

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world…

This Week in AI: OpenAI moves away from safety

After Apple loosened its App Store guidelines to permit game emulators, the retro game emulator Delta — an app 10 years in the making — hit the top of the…

Adobe comes after indie game emulator Delta for copying its logo

Meta is once again taking on its competitors by developing a feature that borrows concepts from others — in this case, BeReal and Snapchat. The company is developing a feature…

Meta’s latest experiment borrows from BeReal’s and Snapchat’s core ideas

Welcome to Startups Weekly! We’ve been drowning in AI news this week, with Google’s I/O setting the pace. And Elon Musk rages against the machine.

Startups Weekly: It’s the dawning of the age of AI — plus,  Musk is raging against the machine

IndieBio’s Bay Area incubator is about to debut its 15th cohort of biotech startups. We took special note of a few, which were making some major, bordering on ludicrous, claims…

IndieBio’s SF incubator lineup is making some wild biotech promises

YouTube TV has announced that its multiview feature for watching four streams at once is now available on Android phones and tablets. The Android launch comes two months after YouTube…

YouTube TV’s ‘multiview’ feature is now available on Android phones and tablets

Featured Article

Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

CSC ServiceWorks provides laundry machines to thousands of residential homes and universities, but the company ignored requests to fix a security bug.

1 day ago
Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is just around the corner, and the buzz is palpable. But what if we told you there’s a chance for you to not just attend, but also…

Harness the TechCrunch Effect: Host a Side Event at Disrupt 2024

Decks are all about telling a compelling story and Goodcarbon does a good job on that front. But there’s important information missing too.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Goodcarbon’s $5.5M seed deck

Slack is making it difficult for its customers if they want the company to stop using its data for model training.

Slack under attack over sneaky AI training policy

A Texas-based company that provides health insurance and benefit plans disclosed a data breach affecting almost 2.5 million people, some of whom had their Social Security number stolen. WebTPA said…

Healthcare company WebTPA discloses breach affecting 2.5 million people

Featured Article

Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Microsoft won’t be facing antitrust scrutiny in the U.K. over its recent investment into French AI startup Mistral AI.

2 days ago
Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Ember has partnered with HSBC in the U.K. so that the bank’s business customers can access Ember’s services from their online accounts.

Embedded finance is still trendy as accounting automation startup Ember partners with HSBC UK

Kudos uses AI to figure out consumer spending habits so it can then provide more personalized financial advice, like maximizing rewards and utilizing credit effectively.

Kudos lands $10M for an AI smart wallet that picks the best credit card for purchases

The EU’s warning comes after Microsoft failed to respond to a legally binding request for information that focused on its generative AI tools.

EU warns Microsoft it could be fined billions over missing GenAI risk info

The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after a United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday.  The trustee is asking…

A US Trustee wants troubled fintech Synapse to be liquidated via Chapter 7 bankruptcy, cites ‘gross mismanagement’

U.K.-based Seraphim Space is spinning up its 13th accelerator program, with nine participating companies working on a range of tech from propulsion to in-space manufacturing and space situational awareness. The…

Seraphim’s latest space accelerator welcomes nine companies

OpenAI has reached a deal with Reddit to use the social news site’s data for training AI models. In a blog post on OpenAI’s press relations site, the company said…

OpenAI inks deal to train AI on Reddit data

X users will now be able to discover posts from new Communities that are trending directly from an Explore tab within the section.

X pushes more users to Communities

For Mark Zuckerberg’s 40th birthday, his wife got him a photoshoot. Zuckerberg gives the camera a sly smile as he sits amid a carefully crafted re-creation of his childhood bedroom.…

Mark Zuckerberg’s makeover: Midlife crisis or carefully crafted rebrand?

Strava announced a slew of features, including AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, a new ‘family’ subscription plan, dark mode and more.

Strava taps AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, unveils ‘family’ plan, dark mode and more

We all fall down sometimes. Astronauts are no exception. You need to be in peak physical condition for space travel, but bulky space suits and lower gravity levels can be…

Astronauts fall over. Robotic limbs can help them back up.

Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build,…

Microsoft’s custom Cobalt chips will come to Azure next week

What a wild week for transportation news! It was a smorgasbord of news that seemed to touch every sector and theme in transportation.

Tesla keeps cutting jobs and the feds probe Waymo